


All Honor Was Reflected In Him

by gooseberry



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Implied Mutilation, Implied Torture, Inheritance, Magic, Magical Realism, Politics, Potential Body Horror?, Question of Belief, Questioning of Reality, Shapeshifting, fairytales - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 16:28:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/800769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooseberry/pseuds/gooseberry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The king has a nephew: a young, skinny thing with dark hair and dark eyes. He looks like any other young dwarf--not yet grown, and not yet much of anything at all. He is undiscovered potential, perhaps--that may be what the king sees in him, because the king treats him gently. The king smiles at him, and touches his hair, and gives praise and reprimands in equal measure.</p>
<p>The king has a lion, too: a massive beast, with a thick, coarse mane the color of amber and wheat. The lion’s paws are thrice the size of any dwarf’s hands, and when it yawns, its mouth is red and its teeth are white. It follows the king’s nephew like a dog, and its withers are at a height with the nephew’s shoulders.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>It's like the bastard child of <i>Bisclavret</i> and <i>The Hobbit</i>. It's nominally a shapeshifting AU, but in truth, it's all fairytales and lais and (skin-based) shapeshifters, and implied torture and mutilation. And like, so much god damned symbolism. I’m sorry. I got a bit carried away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Honor Was Reflected In Him

**Author's Note:**

> _Bisclavret_ is one of my favorite works of literature. Ever. And this is apparently what happens when I think about shapeshifting, because everything is Marie de France and nothing hurts.
> 
> (Though for Fili, everything hurts.)

The king has a nephew: a young, skinny thing with dark hair and dark eyes. He looks like any other young dwarf--not yet grown, and not yet much of anything at all. He is undiscovered potential, perhaps--that may be what the king sees in him, because the king treats him gently. The king smiles at him, and touches his hair, and gives praise and reprimands in equal measure.

The king has a lion, too: a massive beast, with a thick, coarse mane the color of amber and wheat. The lion’s paws are thrice the size of any dwarf’s hands, and when it yawns, its mouth is red and its teeth are white. It follows the king’s nephew like a dog, and its withers are at a height with the nephew’s shoulders.

The nephew pets the lion, digs his fingers into the mane, and the lion’s tail lashes.

“He never speaks,” people whisper, when the king is gone and the nephew is turned away and the lion is asleep. “He’s a mute,” they say, and “He’s cursed,” they say, and “It is because of the lion,” they say.

x

They found Kili covered in blood, in torn and muddy clothes, with twigs in his hair and scratches on his face. His hands had been clutching tufts of amber hair, and his fingernails had been bent and broken. When Thorin touched Kili’s shoulder, Kili had shuddered, then held on tighter to the hair.

“Kili,” Thorin had said, “where is your brother?”

And Kili had said, “I don’t know.”

They’d taken Kili home, where they’d washed his face and bandaged his hands and dressed him in clean clothes. They had tucked Kili into his bed, slipping a pillow beneath his head and laying his hands on top of the blankets. Thorin had kissed Kili, and left a lamp burning by the door.

Dis wept, and wept, and wept, and when Thorin said, “You still have one son,” she struck him with her hand.

But when Thorin went to Kili’s room in the morning, and found Kili sleeping on the floor, half hidden beneath the bed, he thought that perhaps there were no sons left to Dis, nor nephews left to himself.

x

“He’s a mute,” Balin said, and Dwalin said, “He’s mad.”

Thorin said nothing at all, but he twisted the rings on his hands. 

“Something,” Balin said, “must have happened to him,” and Dwalin said, “He’s ruined, Thorin.”

And he was--he was ruined; somehow, in the span of hours, Kili had been ruined, and now Thorin had nothing left but a sister who no longer spoke to him and a nephew who no longer spoke at all. 

It was a quiet madness, the sort that slowly came together like the building of snowdrifts, cold and silent; the subtle growth of madness, from muteness and starvation, the way Kili looked past walls and the way Kili touched his fingers to his mouth. It was a cold madness, in the way Kili leaned against Thorin’s back, his fingers spread across Thorin’s shoulder blades, and kissed the weight of Thorin’s crown.

Kili walked the halls in his silence, through the throne room and the treasure room, past tapestries and arches and walls streaked with gold. Thorin watched him when he could, the way Kili turned around corners and slipped into hallways and climbed old, forgotten stairways.

“Watch him,” Thorin told his guards, and a half dozen dwarves followed Kili through the mountain, through day and through night and all the hours between.

And Kili walked outside of the mountain, too--he wandered down the slopes of the grassy hills, and he climbed the steep angles of the cliffsides. He dangled from the mountain, perched on dizzying heights like a mountain goat, and Thorin wondered what Kili was searching for.

Then he wondered how he could be so stupid--Fili, of course; always Fili, because everyone was searching for Fili.

“Where is your brother?” Thorin asked some nights, when Kili was leaning against the throne and Thorin was resting a hand on Kili’s shoulder. Kili said nothing: he clenched his hands and he ground his teeth, he leaned harder against the throne, but he said nothing; Thorin held Kili’s shoulder with his left hand, and held his throne with his right.

x

This was how they found Fili:

Kili wandered away from the mountain, first down to the foothills, then to the valley; to the river, and the fields where the men sowed their wheat. He wandered further each day, until he didn’t return. One day went by, and two; three, then four. On the fifth day, Thorin found him in the middle of a field, where the wheat was young and green and the earth still smelled new.

There was a lion in the field, lying in the wet dirt. The wheat was broken under the weight of the lion’s body, and the lion’s paws had left deep impressions in the soil, paw pads and the hinting prick of claws. The lion’s flank was lifting and falling, the steady breathing of a sleeping cat, and the tip of the tail was lashing.

Kili’s hands were buried in the lion’s mane, and his face was pressed against the lion’s shoulder. Kili’s body looked utterly fragile against the bulk of the lion, his neck thin and as easy to snap as a dried reed. The lion heard Thorin’s step, or it smelled Thorin’s sweat of fear, because it lifted its head, looking towards Thorin; Kili lifted his head, too, and his face was streaked with tears and his mouth was open, and his face looked brilliant with joy.

“Thorin,” Kili said in a voice rough with months of silence, “I’ve found him.”

The dirt was wet and, when Thorin dug his fingers into the earth, it was cold. His throat felt tight and his arms felt numb, and he could feel the knees of his trousers growing damp.

“Kili,” he said, and then again, as loud as he dared, “Kili--”

Thorin took them home together; there was nothing else to be done. He stood, and wiped his hands on his trousers, grinding the wet dirt into the rough weave. He said, “Come along, then,” and he took a step back, and watched.

The lion, when it stood, was as tall as Kili, their shoulders at a height; its body was long, and thickly built, and Thorin was certain he could feel the shuddering of earth with each step the lion took. 

x

There were quiet secrets in the mountain, hidden inside Kili’s head and body. Kili whispered his secrets to the lion, tucking his face into the lion’s mane. Thorin heard only snatches--broken fragments that weren’t lost in the shell-shape of the lion’s ear. He watched as Kili pressed against the lion, and he watched as the lion leaned in return, nearly buckling Kili beneath its weight.

A voice came back to Kili, and when he wasn’t whispering into the lion’s ear, he spoke to Thorin. It wasn’t much--it was never much--but Thorin took it with hungry gratitude. He sat in Kili’s rooms, at the foot of Kili’s chair, and he listened to the sound of Kili breathing, and the way Kili spoke to himself as he read.

“There are birds,” Kili said, and Thorin looked up at him, “that feed their young their blood.”

_I would have_ , Thorin wanted to say. Instead, he asked, “How?”

Kili turned a page of his book, then flipped the page back. “They pierce their breast, with their beaks.”

“And do they die?” Thorin asked, but Kili said nothing.

The lion slept at the foot of Kili’s bed, sprawled across the width of the bed, its paws and head hanging off the side. It stretched as it slept, its claws sheathing and unsheathing as its paws spread. Thorin watched the lion sleep, and thought of how restless Fili had been as a child, how he had fidgeted and squirmed and fought for freedom.

“Does it dream?” he asked Kili. Kili looked up from his books, and over at the lion; then he said, 

“He remembers things. He has nightmares.”

“The lion,” Thorin said curiously, to be sure.

“Fili,” Kili said, and Thorin said again,

“The lion.”

“They tore off his skin,” Kili said, in a voice that was secret, dark and frightened and small enough to be lost in the space between Kili’s face and Thorin’s. “They tore off his skin, all of it.”

“Who?” Thorin asked, sick and horrified; interest, though, was in the back of his throat, like the taste of vomit, and he had to ask, “Who did, Kili?”

But Kili said, “Without his skin, he’ll never change back.”

It was madness, but there was madness in many things. In war, and in love, and in beauty, and in the building of priceless kingdoms. There was madness in Dis’s rage and there was madness in Kili’s faith, and there was madness in Thorin’s desperate search for the truth.

“What do I believe?” he asked, but there was no one to listen to him, or to answer him. He washed his hands, and his face; he held his head beneath the water of his basin, until his lungs felt like fire, and then he lifted his head and gasped for breath. The water ran down to soak the collar of his shirt, and he pressed his hands against his throat. When he slipped his fingers beneath his shirt’s collar, he could feel the coolness of the fabric and the heat of his skin, and he wondered if Fili was skinned alive.

x

“What do you believe?” he once asked Dis. If Kili had taken to stalking hallways, Dis had taken to haunting rooms. She still wore mourning robes, heavy silk embroidered with warding signs and old prayers, but her face was softer and her body was plumper.

She looked at Thorin, then spun the tray in front of her, so the wine was within Thorin’s reach. As Thorin reached for the wine and a glass, Dis said, “I’m never sure. At times I am, but at other times, I begin to have my doubts.”

“But you think that Fili....” Thorin trailed off, looking down at the cup of wine he held in his hands. Dis made a sound in the back of her throat, like she was unsure of what she wanted to say.

“The way they walk,” she finally said, “and the way that Kili holds onto him--no, Thorin,” she said, holding up a finger as Thorin looked up, “it’s more--” She grimaced at him then, and said, “I should know, shouldn’t I? I’m their mother, but I’m not even sure--”

Thorin sipped the wine slowly, but his throat only felt drier. When he had collected himself, his bravery and his fear and his confused despair, he asked, “Is Kili mad?”

“You’ve seen his scars,” she said after a time. “You’ve seen where they tried to peel away--”

“Who,” Thorin interrupted. “I hear ‘they’ from everyone--from you and from Kili, from the rumors and the whispers, but I never hear a name.” When Dis said nothing, Thorin pushed, asking, “Was it the elves? The men? Or did your boys do it to themselves, Dis?”

Dis breathed in sharply, and her cheeks flushed red, like they always did when she was angry. “They would never,” she began to say, and Thorin interrupted her again.

“It was a mutilation, Dis,” he said. “Whips, perhaps, or--”

“It isn’t a curse,” Dis said over Thorin’s voice, and her hands looked as though they were shaking.

“It isn’t a blessing,” Thorin said back. He reached out and, when Dis didn’t pull away, he patted her hand clumsily.

“A secret,” is what she said, when her hands had gone still beneath Thorin’s. Her cheeks were beginning to lose their angry flush and her fingers, when she turned her hands over, were cold to his touch. “There are old ways, and secret ways.”

“So you believe?” he asked, and she looked away, saying,

“There is still magic in the world, Thorin.”

There was magic in the world, he knew. There were dead things that stalked the living, and there were living things that would not die. Trees walked and mountains breathed, and there were winds that screamed like women. There was magic--old and faltering and fading, but magic nonetheless.

He knew that there was power in words, and that there was meaning in actions; there were secrets in the world, hidden between the words carved in every lintel and post. There were cursed families and blessed thrones, and there were children who were devoured by things unseen.

“I want to believe,” he said in a low voice; it was better--it was kinder--than to think of Fili’s body left to rot. It was kinder than imagining Dis’s sons being mutilated for no purpose.

Dis smiled at him then, her face soft but her skin wan, and she said, “We were born from stone. What is to say we cannot be carved like stone?”

x

Thorin has a nephew and a lion, and he is not sure which is the dwarf and which is the beast. Kili’s hands are like claws and the lion’s paws are like velvet, and together they take Thorin’s breath away. Thorin watches them pace through the mountain, as though they are stalking something unseen, and he watches the brittle youth of Kili’s shoulders and the supple strength of the lion’s back, wondering what Aule has given him.

“The people,” Balin cautions him, “will never follow a king they think is mad.”

Thorin thinks of Kili’s fingers digging into the lion’s mane and the lashing of the lion’s tail; he wonders how long it took for Fili’s skin to be torn away from his body, and he wonders what Kili sees when he closes his eyes. 

“But Kili,” Thorin says, running his hand along the arm of his throne, “will still inherit.”

“The people,” Balin begins to say, and Thorin presses his thumb against the stone of the throne; there is a crack in the stone, invisible to the eye, but he can feel it against his skin, and he wonders if he could wedge his nail into it; if he could tear and dig and pry until the throne fell to pieces, and created a kingdom more beautiful.

“Tell them,” Thorin says, “that Kili has been touched by Mahal. He has been blessed.” He is unsure what he believes, or if he believes anything; he knows only the passing of time: the magic of change and the decay of beauty and the fading of pain. He is old, and Kili is young, and Fili’s body was never found. 

“Even mountains change their shape,” Thorin says, more to himself than to Balin; more to the mountain than to anyone else. When Balin haltingly bows, Thorin smiles at him, and wedges his thumbnail into the crack of the throne.


End file.
